


Vise Grip

by Liondragon (Sameshima_Shuzumi)



Series: Theme: Insight Guns [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Captain America: Civil War (Movie) Spoilers, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, Gun Violence, M/M, Wordcount: 1.000-3.000, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-16
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 20:39:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6872554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sameshima_Shuzumi/pseuds/Liondragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers would do anything for Bucky Barnes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vise Grip

**Author's Note:**

> Blowing off some steam. Don't go ignoring the meta tags.

unauthorized duplication and distribution prohibited 

Steve was grateful Sam was there. Sam had been stationed in Berlin before. He knew the city well, and two years of urban surveillance and tactics had honed his skills at evasion. No match for the skills of the man they were transporting, but Sam as always had risen to the challenge. Steve's enhanced hearing caught bystanders chattering that the grid was still down. 

They had a little time.

Sam took point as Steve dragged Bucky's unconscious body along. Steve could feel the muscles and soft tissues in his throat begin to knit back together. It was painful, but there was always pain. Steve couldn't remember a world without it.

Putting one foot in front of the other, Steve tightened his grip on the metal arm, and did what he did best: make a plan.

*

Steve hated that Sam knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. Because Sam tended to say out loud what Steve usually kept in.

"Put him on a ch— bench or something, and _you_ tighten this, if he's so heavy that I can't lift him," Sam said. His muscles strained against the rusted vise, but it was moving. "Unless you're looking for velvet cushions for his ass. Maybe a drink with a little umbrella?"

"He liked his liquor neat," said Steve. He hooked an ankle around a crate to drag it under Bucky. "I'd rather you do that part. If it was me, it might slip the threads and crush his arm."

Sam's brow twitched. "He feels sensation with it?"

"I saw him flinch," said Steve. When Bucky had broken the floorboards next to Steve's face. Close enough to kill. Close enough to touch. "I heard him scream when he fell. When he jumped, I mean, down the stairwell."

"Right," said Sam. "Got it. You, only slower." He was extra careful for the rest of the turns. "That doc went through a lot of trouble to set him off."

"He did."

"Can he budge this press?" 

"I'll put extra weights on it, and chain it down." Short of ripping off his own arm, Bucky wasn't going anywhere.

Sam wasn't careful with Steve. They were on the clock. Sam couldn't afford to be. "What if this isn't the guy who knows his own drink order?"

Steve felt Bucky's breaths on the back of his hand. He combed his fingers through Bucky's damp hair, and met Sam's eyes.

*

Steve would be nowhere without Sam, who could procure a weapon in any city in the world. Picked it up in the Air Force, he'd said, believe it or not. That's my superpower.

Steve was his own weapon. 

And now, so was Bucky.

*

Steve let Sam watch over Bucky while Steve watched the perimeter. Steve's senses were sharp enough to merit the advantage. 

As Steve's torn muscles began to heal, he thought of the wan and wary ghost he'd met in Bucharest instead of the potential time-bomb in the next room.

He went over every last word from Bucky's mouth, every stray twitch in his body. If all Steve could do was bear witness, he'd do it. Every time, he'd failed at saving Bucky. He'd tried. But as much as Bucky had seemingly lived the civilian life Steve could only catch glimpses of, Bucky had never been free.

It was on Steve to inscribe Bucky's wishes into his serum-sharpened memory. Bucky had been making his own choices for the first time in a century. Steve had to honor his choices, Steve who had never asked himself if he knew Bucky, who was the last person alive who could read him like a book. 

When the only choice that had ever been taken from Steve was the choice of loving him.

*

There were only so many possibilities. Sam saw it too, Steve knew.

One, the doctor could be colluding with Bucky. That one Steve discarded. Not only because of what he'd seen in Bucky's ... home, but because the doctor had set himself up as a decoy for the Soldier to hurt Sam. To come after Steve.

This theory would be what the task force would be operating under. There were specific and automatic responses for this kind of terrorist attack by a known Hydra agent. They didn't know what Steve knew. They hadn't heard Bucky's words, and were under no obligation to believe them. They hadn't felt the bone-deep distinction between Bucky running for his life and the Winter Soldier on a mission of extraction.

Steve's chest still hurt.

Two, the doctor wanted Bucky. Wanted what he had. What did Bucky have besides the Winter Soldier's skills? The Soldier's intel. Secrets buried in the SHIELD dump, or unknown from one Hydra arm to the next. Natasha had taught Steve about control words. He knew it was a possibility, given the litany of horrors they'd put Bucky through to wring the Soldier out of him.

Three, Bucky had been convinced to make a deal with the doctor.

Four, neither had what they wanted yet, and they planned to rendezvous elsewhere.

No matter how they made Steve's dried eyes ache, those led to the same outcome. 

Steve saw no reason to dwell on what he couldn't change. 

*

"Which Bucky am I talking to?"

He stared at Steve.

They could hear the arm whirring, straining against the press.

"Your mother's name was Sarah," he recited, and Steve's heart began to sink, sink, sink.

*

Even if Steve had been tempted to believe that he was wrong, that he had misread, that there was no chance the universe would lay this cruelty on them again — it happened so fast.

He barely got Sam away in time.

*

"What were your orders!" Steve could barely keep from yelling outright. The area was deserted but not for long. There were electronic ears searching for them. There were hounds who could point their way.

As Sam clung to him, mouthing 'I'm okay, I'm okay,' the Winter Soldier answered.

"You don't need your friends."

At Steve's side, Sam lifted his head.

"I'm the only friend you need."

Steve gathered his wits. "Is that what that doctor said?"

The Winter Soldier tried to smile.

*

Five, Bucky was supposed to escape. 

Steve was supposed to chase him.

Wasn't that how they'd gotten into this mess? 

Not without you.

I'll follow you.

We're going to—

*

There were only so many probable outcomes. 

They could let him go.

Or.

*

Sam asked.

"Are you sure?"

His voice was hoarse.

"We don't have much choice," said Steve. He couldn't look away from the vise, where the arm lay trapped yet continued to writhe. 

"Was gonna say it's an obvious trap." Sam drew his weapon. The strap had been ripped off his holster; the safety was still on. Sam laid it flat on a worktable and kept his hand on it.

"I know. The doctor wants me alone."

Steve couldn't look away.

Sam said, "You won't be alone. Damn it." He touched Steve on the shoulder. "We could call Stark."

"You heard the scanner. He'll have the identical directives." Tony was bound by the Accords, and by the Secretary of State breathing down his neck. "Even if we can convince him to stand down, he won't have the tech to undo this in time. It's only for... for traumatic memories." Steve wouldn't need it. The serum never let him forget.

"Could do it Nat's way. Solid hit upside the head."

"The impact from the helicopter crash was the limit of what _I'd_ survive."

And between them, Wanda and Vision had no ability to teleport. Thor and his realm's advanced techniques were out of reach.

Steve had tried.

He'd stared out the window at the crisp blue sky and begged every being in the universe, and none of them were coming. Not in time.

"I could do it."

Steve finally turned away from that blank, patient smile. "Sam," he said thickly. "I can't ask you to. I have to."

He'd lose Sam too. 

"Are you sure," Sam repeated.

*

"Bucky said he didn't do that anymore."

*

The serum allowed Steve to run down a hundred strategy trees in a minute. It wasn't that he was always _right_. It was that he saw events unfolding before his eyes, the product of hundreds of nights reading by a dying lamp, devouring the histories and speeches and strategies of humankind. Smuggled to him under Bucky's coat when they said the book dust would set off his lungs. Quickened and clarified by Dr. Erskine's serum.

They could try to move him. 

If he woke, they had no means to contain him.

The ones who did ... were closing in. 

*

"Tell us where the doctor is," said Sam. He was desperate, and angry, and he was keeping a lid on it for Steve's sake.

"No."

"What's his plan?"

"Siberia," said the Soldier. "Where I am from."

Natasha would know that, Steve thought vacantly. She could pass it to Sharon once they got away from the task force. Twelve hours would be pushing it.

He knew how long a search grid of the Berlin metro would take.

"What about it?"

"There are others." His gaze slid back to Steve. How many afternoons and early mornings had Steve spent staring into those eyes? 

To Steve he said, "I can eliminate them. Let me follow you. I'll let your friends be. I can comply."

The scanner hissed.

"You're lying," Steve said.

*

"It's what he would want—"

"How can you know? We can—!"

"Go ahead and bring Stark here," the Soldier interrupted Sam. "I'll tell him for you."

Steve blanched. He looked at Sam. Sam looked back. Steve had told Sam on the way to the Smithsonian, on the eve of the Triskelion battle.

They'd never spoken of it again. When they'd assembled after SHIELD's fall... they'd all seen the extent of Tony's shellshock. None of them, not even Natasha, had ever breathed a word to Tony about Zola's insinuations about his parents.

Steve stared down the Winter Soldier. There were branches of strategies erupting behind those eyes. 

Nothing of the man they had both known.

"It's what he would want," Steve Rogers said. Hollow. Tired. "I know him."

*

"Now you'll do _this_ to yourself."

"Sorry, Sam."

"Why are you apologizing to me!"

Steve's hand moved from the table. "It's too late. You don't have to... it's too late for us."

*

The canvassing helicopters were drawing closer. With them came strike teams with orders to kill.

Orders to which they were beholden.

Steve glanced at the Bucky's right hand, free and flexing with barely restrained violence. He drew closer. Placed both hands on his shoulders, flesh and metal alike. Sam made a noise; after a moment, Steve heard him withdraw to the other room.

He had to try one more time. "You could attack me. Why don't you?"

The Soldier looked up at him with empty eyes and said: "You are to remain alive."

Steve Rogers felt a chill run down his straightened spine, his healthy heart pumping in his barrel chest like he'd never known a single bitter winter, like he'd never needed a friend to save him, like he'd never had to tear the world apart for the one person he knew better than himself. The one who'd spent a century tearing himself apart for him.

He pressed his brow to Bucky's for one more familiar breath. The Soldier's orders prevented him from moving. He knew; it showed in his even breaths and his steady gaze. He didn't move when Steve touched his lips to that brow, whispered a prayer, replaced them with the gun from the small of his back, and squeezed the trigger.

   
   
   
   
   
   



End file.
